Three Elements of a Healthy Sales Qualification Process

How to Think About Your Sales Qualification Process

At its core, Sales is about delivering a solution that eases a prospect’s pain. If you can find a prospect with significant pain, offer a solution with real value, and decide on a price that is worth the effort by both parties, a deal can be made. Of course, the sales qualification process is much more complex and nuanced than what’s listed above.

Salespeople need to navigate doubts, objections, inertia, competition, internal power structures, and so much more. But still, at its core, Sales is about cutting through everything else to discover whether the prospect truly needs the solution and whether the price of the solution is worthwhile for both parties.

To summarize, then, a good sales opportunity will have the following three qualities: 

• Winnability
• Profitability
• Serviceability

But too often, companies can focus myopically on winnability and lose sight of the holistic impact of acquiring a new customer. Below, we detail the importance of each quality of a good deal and why each must be considered during the sales qualification process when qualifying prospects.

Winnability

Put simply, a good sales opportunity is a winnable sales opportunity. Reps can waste time chasing leads that are extremely unlikely to close. Of course, using traditional qualification methods, it’s not always easy to know which opportunities are likely or unlikely to close.

The more accurately companies can determine which opportunities are winnable and which are not, the more efficiently they can organize their sales reps’ time to focus on deals with the highest probability of converting to revenue.

Profitability

Because sales organizations are judged based on their ability to acquire revenue, the incentives for acquiring revenue and acquiring healthy revenue can sometimes be misaligned. Many companies determine the profitability of a potential deal late in the sales cycle when they can put together an implementation plan and determine the cost of implementation against the price they can charge for their service. However, because profitability is an essential component of a quality opportunity, determining whether an opportunity is likely to be profitable early in the sales process can save salespeople significant time and enable them to focus on higher-quality opportunities.

Serviceability

According to Vitally, top companies earn over 30% of their new revenue from upselling, cross-selling, and renewals. The key to successful upselling, cross-selling, and renewals is deceptively simple: happy customers. But in order for prospects to become happy, serviceable customers, they must first be high-quality prospects. 

Why? Well, serviceable customers have significant pain that is addressed by your company’s solution. If you don’t spend time understanding how significant their pain is and how your solution addresses their pain during the Sales cycle, then you might end up with a customer who won’t adopt your product, will be unhappy with the solution, and might be likely to churn.

By checking for serviceability early in the Sales cycles, companies can ensure they focus solely on prospects that will become healthy customers. And by doing so, companies improve their upsells, cross-sells, renewals, and references. 

Company Health is Sales Health

A company’s success is a virtuous cycle, where each successive victory makes the one that will follow easier to achieve. When Sales focuses on the right opportunities, those that are healthy for the company as a whole, they bring on customers that make the whole company successful. Customers that are likely to use and significantly benefit from the product are easier to service, more likely to pay their bills, and more likely to purchase more products or services from your company down the line. 

And that’s the beauty of focusing on healthy opportunities: it always comes back around. With happier customers, there are more references, more upsells, more cross-sells, and greater brand equity, all of which make future sales easier and more abundant. When sales organizations can take the long view and focus their efforts on the right opportunities, their department thrives not only in the short term but also in the long term.